Qing Wang

Qing Wang grew up in Guizhou, one of China’s most remote provinces, with a singular ambition to see what was on the other side of the mountain. Today she is one of China’s most respected independent journalists, a pioneering podcaster, and a bridge between two worlds that increasingly struggle to understand each other.

For a decade, Qing criss-crossed Europe as a foreign correspondent. She covered the Russia-Ukraine war, Brexit, the Covid-19 pandemic, the European refugee crisis, and the US election. From 2018 to 2024 she served as chief international correspondent for Jiemian News, one of China’s largest digital media outlets. Before that, she led a humanitarian project at Radio Netherlands Worldwide, working with Syrian refugee women in Jordan and Lebanon.

In 2019, Qing co-founded The Weirdo Podcast (不合时宜). At a time when Chinese media was growing more cautious and more uniform, The Weirdo chose a different direction. It was feminist, progressive, and genuinely curious about the world. The show has won multiple awards and is cited as a leading example of free thought in China today.

Through the podcast, Qing Wang has interviewed some of the world’s most formidable thinkers such as Noam Chomsky, Bill Gates, and Francis Fukuyama. She is widely regarded as one of China’s finest interviewers of global intellectuals. What distinguishes her is her ability to ask precise, disarming questions that cut through ideology to something more human.

Qing’s one million Weibo followers, most of them young, urban, and educated, have earned her recognition as one of Weibo’s top 100 young thinkers and a top young women influencer. Yet numbers only tell part of the story. What sets her apart is the quality of conversation she cultivates. Her audiences argue, debate, and push back in real time. The result is one of the most intellectually alive spaces in Chinese public discourse today.

Qing Wang is currently the inaugural China and the World Fellow at Asia Society Switzerland. There, she explores how Chinese citizens perceive global events. From the war in Ukraine to the rise of electric vehicles, from the Venezuela crisis to Germany’s industrial anxieties, her work is nuanced, first-hand, and free of easy answers.